We’ve built hundreds of websites over the years and all projects inevitably suffer from the same, schedule-crunching problem… content.

The potential problems with content are numerous.

Often a client can envision what they want, but not find the time to write it. Or they may assume they can pull content from other marketing materials, only to find it’s become outdated or inaccurate since those materials were first written.

Whatever the problem, they all cause delays. We’ve had projects where we’ve finished the design and programming and literally waited a full year for the few pages of content needed to complete and launch the site.

What can be done?

After running into these problems again and again, we now recommend the first stage of any project be a content audit.

In this audit, we compile all available content for review. Here’s what we look for:

current website

brochures, flyers and other marketing materials

press, articles or news stories

social media networks

available photography

video or audio content

a high-quality digital version of the client’s logo

Once we have that, we go through it one item at a time, looking for accuracy, quality and relevance.

With the bad content removed or updated, we’re now free to identify gaps, assign those gaps to the client or our team, and move forward with the project.

The Mixergy podcast is an amazing collection of interviews with entrepreneurs, marketers and business owners on how they achieved their success. Mixergy also offers a premium membership (which I also subsrcibe to), that includes even more in-depth interviews and online courses on writing, lead generation, funding, and other essential skills.

Decidedly more tech-focused than some of the others, the Startups For The Rest of Us podcast is a weekly podcast with two software developers, each of whom is building a software application. They discuss topics like hiring developers, marketing their products, building and using mailing lists, and so on.